Sensible Sentencing Trust head Garth McVicar – who usually backs the victims of crime – supported Emery’s early release.

He said Emery had to “pay a price for what he did” but the 52-year-old was a “different type of offender”.

“I didn’t think he should have gone to jail,” said Mr McVicar.

“That young offender [Pihema] had been doing graffiti before and Emery had been becoming extremely frustrated with it.

Extremely frustrated.

Let’s think about that for a minute, kiddies.

Garth McVicar – who talks the big talk about victims living in fear and crimewaves crashing over the country in a suspiciously Polynesian-looking tsunami – sees no fucking problem with Bruce Emery walking the streets.

He takes no issue with letting a man, who cannot control his frustration, whose temper is on such a hair trigger that he stabbed a teen to death for tagging a fence, roam the streets of New Zealand.

Bruce Emery killed Pihema Cameron over a fucking fence. He chased him down and killed him. Over a fucking lick of paint. And he has just been informed by our justice system and our biggest, most self-righteous crusader against crime, that what he did was not that bad. That he was justified in killing a fifteen-year-old over a fucking tag.

18 comments

I’m so glad you blogged about this. I’m sure everyone knows that to Garth McVicar “different type of offender” just means white.

He’s repulsive. Lost in all of this is that Pihema was a good kid. He’d never been in trouble with police before that night. Yet McVicar has told everyone who’ll listen that he was this terrifying, menacing criminal. He was just a kid.

I disagree, Trina. Garth McVicar is merely the current mouthpiece of an organisation which advocates a punitive, brutal, hypocritical approach to justice issues – and calls itself the Sensible Sentencing Trust when what they actually want is longer, harsher, permanent sentences.

Just putting a different face on that kind of kneejerk criminals-are-evil-aliens-who-occur-in-a-societal-vacuum rubbish is hardly going to make me take them seriously.

Actually you are right, there is no reason to take the SST seriously. The are a bunch of reactionary racist hypocrites. I think McVicar is more than a figurehead though. I just read somewhere he was nominated for NZer of the Year – WTF!?

FWIW McVicar founded the trust and does seem to drive things; it would be poorer without him. Except that they’ve also managed to eg really annoy Labour recently, so he may now be a liablity for them after all.